


Fiction is a lie that tells the truth

by boobuu



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-25
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-19 18:49:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9455735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boobuu/pseuds/boobuu
Summary: Goody likes to tell stories about how they met. He’ll say: “I ran into Billy on my way to Charms one day, just in time to see him hex three other boys in quick order. The stairs had moved on us again overnight, and I wandered into another dead end hallway to find Billy glaring down a whole pack of Ravenclaw boys."





	

**Author's Note:**

> For whatever reason, I've wanted to write a Harry Potter AU for awhile. I know it'd make more sense to set things in America/Ilvermorny, but that would require so much additional worldbuilding. I'll leave that to someone more ambitious.
> 
> (At some point I will wander back into canon territory, or at least canon-AU territory.)

Goody likes to tell stories about how they met. He’ll say: “I ran into Billy on my way to Charms one day, just in time to see him hex three other boys in quick order. The stairs had moved on us again overnight, and I wandered into another dead end hallway to find Billy glaring down a whole pack of Ravenclaw boys. I’d seen him around before that, of course, but that was our first proper introduction. I stuck around to make sure they didn’t get the jump on him again—House loyalties, you know—but they ran off pretty quick after that, and who’d blame them? I’d never seen wandwork like that, but who knows what they teach you at Mahoutokoro.”

“That was our second year, wasn’t it, Billy? Friends ever since.”

Goody’s audience usually eats it up. Everyone likes a story about lifelong friends, Goody says, everyone likes to think that you can hold on to the same people you knew when you were twelve and haul them into the future with you, one step at a time. And Goody tells beautiful stories about the gruff transfer student he meets before Charms, how they spend summers sending owls back and forth with news, how they attend the Yule Ball with a set of Hufflepuff sisters. “Billy was always better at flying,” Goody says, chagrined, “could’ve made the Quidditch team if he’d ever shown any interest in the damn sport.”

Sometimes a particularly nosy witch will ask more and more specific questions, but Goody always has an answer: they each get a respectable handful of N.E.W.Ts, the only class they didn’t take together was Alchemy, and Billy gets bitten by a Hippogriff in their fifth year. “One of the only creatures I’ve known with the poor taste to favor me instead of him,” Goody will smile, and Billy holds his tongue when they turn to him, brows raised, thinking: him, really?

But the stories do the trick, they put people to ease, make them think they have a bead on the sort of people they are. Good Slytherin boys turned into good Slytherin men, and that’s the one detail that Goody never lies about, even if it gives people a start when they hear it, make them eye the two of them a little more suspiciously. Goody never talks about Defense Against the Dark Arts, never talks about his brothers, never gives his real last name, but the one thing he can’t do is lie about his House, even though it seems like it would be a fairly simple matter.

Goody laughs a little when he tells him that the first time, but it’s a hollow sound. “I’d be an entirely different person if I hadn’t been in Slytherin, Billy.”

“I’d think that has more to do with being a Robicheaux than being a Slytherin, and you’re more than happy to lie about the former.”

“Well now, what you don’t understand is that there isn’t any difference between being a Robicheaux and being a Slytherin. The Sorting Hat understood that.”

And Billy doesn’t understand, not for a time, but then again he’s never had something else sit in judgment of himself like that, never had the full measure of his history and his potential weighed and accounted for. He’s never been to Hogwarts, he’s never been to any wizarding school at all, as if Mahoutokoro would’ve taken him in, poor and Korean as he was, and the only things he knows about that life are what he gleans from Goody’s stories.

It’s a good life, Billy can tell—but in the end it’s just another one of Goody’s stories.

Sometimes Billy wonders if things would’ve turned out that way, in a different life. If he had gone to Hogwarts, would Goody have given him a second glance? He sees a picture of Goody, once, in a dusty corner of the hollowed out Robicheaux estate. In his school robes, surrounded by his brothers, the boy that he was looks all bright-eyed and golden, happy in a way that Billy’s never seen. The boy waves at him and winks, laughing, and Billy wonders if it ever could’ve been that simple.

(He knows better than that, knows that the youngest son of one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight families would never have been best friends with a muggle-born orphan, but he likes to think there could have been a chance that Goody would have walked him to Charms, sat next to him at dinner. Would that Goody have kissed him after class one day, or is Goody's affection the one thing that Billy has over his fictional youth?)

He puts the picture down, never tells Goody about it. They don’t come back to the house and Billy figures it’s for the best, haunted as it is by the ghosts of the still-living.

There’s not much of a resemblance between Goody and the boy in the picture, but Billy figures the same is true of him. At night, sometimes, when Goody’s got the shakes and can’t sleep, when Billy has to hold him down to keep him from scratching his left arm raw, when he casts expelliarmus and then lumos in quick succession, trying to convince Goody he’s not in Azkaban anymore, that he’s served his time—Goody talks about the war. It comes slowly, and Billy ends up piecing together the details of Goody’s past along with the life they never had. For every story about mandrakes and weekends at Hogsmeade, Goody gives him small slivers of his life: how an Expulso Curse can rip through a line of Aurors, how a man sounds when he’s being burned alive by Fiendfyre, how it felt to walk out of Azkaban the only Robicheaux not dead or serving a life sentence.

“You’re not there anymore, Goody,” he says, “It’s only me.”

“It’s only you,” Goody repeats back to him, woodenly.

He asks Goody: Tell me again about how you stayed with me for the holidays our third year, when you figured out I had nowhere else to go, how Bryonie Hawkes screamed when there were mice in her Wizard Crackers.

And Goody does.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a paraphrased Albert Camus quote.
> 
> I'm not sure if there are any non-life sentences at Azkaban. I tried looking it up, but the wiki only states that the use of an Unforgivable Curse leads to a life sentence, nothing about whether killing someone with something less than an Avada Kedavra would lead to a term of years. So until someone tells me different, that's what I'm going with.
> 
> The wiki reports that, in the video game, the Expulso Curse acts like an automatic rifle when charged.


End file.
